Observations

Virtually every operational activity in the police department includes spatial
relationships. Traditionally, these activities have been supported by paper maps and pins. Police officers now have the ability to immediately generate maps directly relevant to the situation at hand. Police agencies collect vast amounts of data from many sources including called-for-services, arrests, first information reports and daily report. Data in this form, however, can be difficult to visualise. The same information displayed graphically provides a powerful decision making tool for investigators, supervisors, and administrators. The visual format shows relationships and patterns that are buried in the data. GIS could also be used to explore the relationship between crime and the environment.

User Studies

Research is one of the important stages of any project. A well researched and thought of project is sure to shape well later. Design research/User studies is synonym of the same in Design projects.
However research in Design projects is done is a different manner. You go to the users and interview them not about the system that you are going to design/develop but about their present conditions/system they are living with.
This way of conducting research is called contextual design research and to add jargon to it such design projects are called User-centered/Contextual Design projects.

Contextual research is very important for my project as I cannot assume many operations of the police department. The way Indian police is portrayed by media and some of the bad encounters of common man with police has ruined the face of police. From the very first conversations with the police officers this became clear. The co-operation and warmth that they extended during my initial research works is worth mentioning here. Though I am yet to meet top level officials, I am sure that they will also lend me hand in my project.

After some literature study and interviews with officers I have come up with some of the areas that I can work upon and that duly considers my project profile.

1. Crime Mapping and analysis
2. Crime scene generation for investigation
3. Criminal face development
4. Crime prevention and law & order maintenance with community policing

All of the above projects have immense amount of data flowing in different sections. Hence appropriate for me to take anyone of them. But the final will be selected only after meeting higher level authority. Police department works in very tight schedule and dynamic fashion, where presence of an officer is not fixed. Hence I need to take a cautious step over here in selecting the topic which involved low mobility for me as well as the target user group.

I feel of taking the first topic. There are many reason of going for it.

• This topic falls under the head of Investigating officers. Though they are continuously on move their major time is spent analyzing the data they have gathered.
• Data is gathered from very different areas and time and location. Combining them in a single view is real design challenge. Hence comes the project for an efficient data visualization.
• The project doesn't require me to go around from one place to other now and then, saving my lot of time to do the project work rather than wasting it in transportation only.
• Interviewing officers at a single place becomes easy and helps in quickly getting acquainted with the system and place.

So now I'm waiting for inputs from higher level police officers. Let's see where the project is directed until I write next post.

Project brief

Law enforcement and management of order in society is one of the most important aspect for any country/state to survive. Police department is given this responsibility. The type of issues they deal with are varied ranging from most naive ones like local quarrel to international level terrorism and crime rackets. And the number of these issues is humongous. Everyday 100s of such issues are recorded at each police station. And there are more than 1000s of police stations in just one state. All these cases are to be handled carefully keeping in mind the Human rights. Police not only fights crime it also has to see that no more crime happens but curing it's root cause. Conducting workshops with people (well this might differ in its implementation from officer to office).
Hence there are two facets for working of police department.

1. Direct dealing with public/criminal/victims
2. Dealing with the information captured/generated/modified when a case is registered

The first aspect is very subjective and sensitive as it definitely requires human intervention and introduction of a machine/device will not work.
However second aspect is very open to introduction of a system with the aid of latest technology to bring efficiency and accuracy in the working of department and officers so that the first aspect can be handled more appropriately.

Given this background I propose an information assimilation system for the police department.

I have yet not finalized the type of information and the target group within the department. This can only be done after in depth study of the working of their system.
The system can be employed either for crime analysis or crime prevention for two different styles of policing activity- proactive or reactive.